PRODUCTION

Big open interior spaces, like the Radio City Rockettes’s rehearsing facilities, are always a challenge for the sound department. Add a millions mirrors to the recipe and you have a beatiful reverberant chamber. How did I manage to record such good sound for this video is a secret I will never reveal.

These is a perfect example of my work being invisible. As part of the EPK crew for this movie, my job was to capture the sound for its behind the scenes audiovisual material. The film’s Sound Mixer, Academy Award Nominee William Sarokin, was very kind to give me a live wireless feed of his sound mix. In addition to that I had my own microphones hidden in key places doing their thing, because I needed to capture the director’s voice as well as the talent’s. During the film’s rehearsals it was all me, we shot a number of interviews with key crew members and A-list talent like Forest Whitaker, Angela Basset, Jennifer Hudson and Tyrese Gibson. It was a fun experience.

It was a fun day shooting Sony Music’s Isac Elliot’s music video for his song “What About Me”. I was part of the EPK crew doing all the behind the scenes stuff including interviews and candid moments of the artist being directed.

This film was shot in 2 parts. I was the production sound mixer for the first part shot in the states of PA, NJ & NYC. The second part was shot months later in a different part of the country with a different crew. It was a fun experience getting to work with the great talents of Jena Malone and Riley Keough. Challenging at times for all sorts of reasons, which is normal when the entire sound department is just one person. Great memories I’ll forever treasure.

Who doesn’t love a good overnight shoot? I do. It was great to learn that NYC Artist ELLE had teamed up with Maybeline to make me stay up all night watching her create a huge painting on the floor of one of NYC’s favorite parks. After the art work was done, a voice over needed to be recorded and the production found an excelent place to do it. We recorded Elle’s voice right there and at the end, that’s all you hear. But hey… Who doens’t love a good overnight shoot anyways?

Commercial work is not always fun but this one was. It’s an Ad, it’s a Musical and it’s a Webby Award Honoree. Don’t ask me how I managed to record the production dialog on top of the music playback. It’s a secret. Challenging yes but worth it? Absolutely.

This one was crazy. I mean it. The production took over an entire corner of Manhattan’s Union Square to shoot this commercial. A huge rock was hired to perform the part of an meteor that had crushed in NYC. It wasn’t a real meteor, but don’t tell anyone. In addition to the reporter’s dialog, we recorded a few foley sounds with the crowd and some Voice Overs inside a car. It was awesome. I was not involved in the post production mixing.

2 weeks of intense work in the streets of NYC edited down to 5 minutes. It was cold days. Very cold. We had a secret to keep so everytime we were approached by pedestrians and their lovely questions, they got the most inapropiate answers from us. Well… from me. Anyways, I haven’t fact checked whether this is my work with the biggest exposure ever but it’s the best candidate I’ve found so far. At the time of writing this, it has over 17 Million views on Youtube that has to be important, right?

The first time I ever worked at a Fashion Week show I was amazed to see how tall the models really are. Imagine being a boom operator! Quite the challenge indeed. Frankly, a lot of the times it’s better to boom from below the camera as opposed to using the skies, but only if the sound quality isn’t compromised. The other thing that amazed me was to see how crazy the behind the scenes is. Spaces can be very tight and the rule is to run against the clock. You can tell that people is excited, nervous and anxious. Thankfully, people is always friendly and make things easy for everyone involved, including the EPK crews.  When I worked on this particular production, I already new what to expect and was prepared for it. It was a nice fun experience.

On of the most challenging scenes I’ve done in my career was shot in this film. The action happened in a river and I was one of the boom operators in the production. The only place I could use to hide while operating the boom pole was a big tree and I needed to have the pole (with a heavy mic setup) fully extended. In addition to this, my arms also needed to be fully extended in order to reach the area that needed to be covered. The scenes was also long and intense. Of course, all talent was wearing hidden wireless lavalier microphones but a scene like that NEEDS its ambience track to be perfect because the lavs will not pick up all the natural foley that happens in a live situation. All the natural splashes and screems will never sound natural on a lav mic. That scene, is still today, many years later, one of my proudest work.

The principal photography of this film was an unexpected journey. Why? Hurrican Sandy. Yeah. It hit NYC while we were mid production. A great part of the city lost electricity and our electrical department had to use portable generators to keep the production working. This meant having an incredible amount of background noise on the production sound. I was the boom operator of the movie and had to constantly negotiate a camera frame that would be friendly for the sound department. A lot of crew members don’t realize that sound is a big part of any movie. Or don’t care. In any case, the producers were on our side and made sure we were always able to capture usable sound for their movie. Because at the end of the day, the movie is theirs not ours.